Elizabeth Edwards Calls Husband's Mistress 'Pathetic'

May 1, 2009

By KATE SNOW and JONANN BRADY via

In a new memoir, Elizabeth Edwards lashes out at Rielle Hunter, the woman with whom her husband had an affair. She calls Hunter's life "pathetic," but she also says her husband, former South Carolina Sen. John Edwards, should never have run for president.

Edwards is scheduled to appear on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" Thursday to talk about the book and how she is doing physically after her bout with breast cancer.

In the book, Edwards reveals that she vomited when her husband first told her about the affair in December 2006, days after he announced his presidential candidacy.

"I cried and screamed, I went to the bathroom and threw up," Edwards writes, according to the New York Daily News, which obtained an advance copy of the book.

According to the Daily News, Edwards suggested that Hunter, a video producer who worked for her husband's campaign, seduced John Edwards with the pickup line, "You're so hot."

Edwards apparently does not address the issue of whofathered Hunter's now 1-year-old daughter. John Edwards has said both he and Elizabeth know that he is not the father. Hunter, now 45, was paid $114,000 for producing a batch of short films for the campaign.

"It was a huge judgment, mistake in judgment. But yeah, I didn't think anyone would ever know about it. I didn't," Edwards said in the interview.

He also described coming clean to his wife. "She had to know it, and it was painful for her. Hard and painful for her, but she responded exactly like the kind of woman she is. And then she forgave me and we went to work on it."

Elizabeth Edwards' account, however, is a little messier. She says in the book that when her husband first admitted the adultery he "left most of the truth out," and said it was a one-time fling.

'He Should Not Have Run'

Even when she knew the full truth, Edwards threw herself behind her husband's campaign. When her breast cancer returned in March 2007, she urged him to continue his run.

"One of the reasons that it's important, from my perspective, to move forward with this is that I'm immensely proud of John's campaign," she said at the time.

Edwards writes in the book that she had initially wanted her husband to quit the race, because she was afraid the affair would raise destructive questions for her family, according to the Daily News.

"He should not have run," she writes.

Had John Edwards not run, some political strategists say that could have changed the outcome of the primary.

"If he had come out and dropped out of the race particularly early, I think a lot of voters would have taken a good fresh look at Hillary Clinton. Remember, they supported Edwards because they thought he was honest and trustworthy," said Mark Penn, a Democratic strategist who worked on Clinton's campaign.